Frankie Sachs

I’m gonna hand over to Frankie Sachs today.  Cos Frankie has the words I don’t have…

I met her on Authonomy.  A couple of things she wrote just melted me.  And then we got talking on Twitter.  She’s got that combination of traits I find so deeply alluring – intelligence, passion, humour, honesty, courage. She often says what I’m thinking – but says it without the waffle and the crap.  Anyhow.  If you love visceral gritty gutsy writing read her stuff here and here.  But, be warned, she don’t hold back. If you blanch at blood; if you’re squeamish about sex; if swearing makes you sweat – just don’t go there. Okay?

From The Amazing Frankie (wolverine poet)

"28 November 2011

There’s whole a lot of meta tumbled down the rabbit-hole of my consciousness lately. It’s a churning mass of sticky, swollen thoughts, and I feel like, if only I can separate them, I’ll be able to see how they all relate. My gut says they do relate.

How the reader as much as the writer imbues written words with their meaning, and what responsibility the writer and reader each bear in shaping that meaning; how we judge and relate to people/events/ideas based on tiny scraps of incomplete information; the pressure to shut up and suck up and fluff up versus honesty; popularity versus integrity; how reality is an individual experience of subjective perception and how much of it we just fucking make up.

Self-perception, perception of other, self-perception of other’s perception of self and its effect on self-perception. What am I saying, and what are you reading? And do I mean what you think I mean? And if I don’t, which meaning is right?

Is there a right?

God, there are so many mirrors in here and I am trying to find my way out and I think there’s a scary clown in here too. I think it’s me.

Do you like me, do you really like me?

Does it fucking matter? (Should it?)

Ghosts in the Machines

by Frankie Sachs

In the future (maybe)
they'll cull the DNA of a personality
from shards trapped in ether.

fragments
          Facebook and MySpace
          snapshots of defunct message boards
          abandoned blogs
          the Twitter archives of the Library of Congress.

Our Jurassic mosquitoes in digital amber.

After electron regenesis
will we remember 
the things we didn't say?

November 15 2011

Catching the reflection of myself in someone else’s mental image and realizing that the Frankie they see is not the person I feel inside my skin shakes me. It surprises the hell out of me that anyone notices me enough to form an opinion. I’m just one little monkey with a typewriter, after all.

Someone out there believes I see the world in black and white. The Frankie that lives in my head doesn’t see black and white. Not even shades of gray. In my head the world is a peyote rainbow and I feel every goddamn coruscating band like a sandstorm.

How does Frankie of the Rainbows become someone else’s Frankie the Absolutist? Fucked if I know. But I can imagine.

And I imagine it’s because I try very fucking hard to write with passion and conviction. Always. I try very fucking hard to live with passion and conviction too. It’s not so easy these days. I’m soul weary and it goes all the way to the bone and I wonder how much more caring I can do. I used to be such a fighter.

That girl, she never backed down from anything. She never lost a fight because she believed with all her heart that to win, you just have to fight harder. Which is true.

Except when it isn’t.

The world wasn’t black and white then, either. That girl, she had a trick. If you talk the talk and you walk the walk, nobody knows you’re scared as fuck on the inside. Sometimes you can even fool yourself. Even when you’re almost undone, you’ve gotta keep on walking and talking to keep the wolves away. The alternative is unthinkable.

Maybe someone believing Frankie on the Page is the totality of Frankie the Person is not the worst thing that could happen; maybe it means what’s on the page keeps the wolves away."

Thanks, Frankie.  Jane xxx